The Course of Life

My Curriculum Vitae

This is for me - probably the most excited I have ever been to write anything, in my entire life. And I have written a lot over the years.

I said before. Words are my currency. My value.

I am going to dive deep here. In order to understand me, you need to understand first my connection with language.

In the last essay - Sixteen Questions - I wrote about many of the labels that have been applied to me in my life. It wouldn’t be honest for me to say that some of them don’t hurt. They do.

It isn’t that they are all wrong. I can fit into many boxes. Life has been a series of adaptations. So, by all accounts, I am hard to explain. Even to myself.

It is the reduction of a label that hurts. There is a lot more to the man than any one label can fit.

But some of the labels are pretty freakin’ sweet - ngl.

Let’s talk about the cool ones.

Gifted. Wizard. Brilliant. Genius. A PhD student (personal woot on that one). All-time favorite - MattGPT.

I love language. I will start there. I always have. But I did not always know how to use it.

That came over the course of life - which is, if you take the Latin literally, exactly what a curriculum vitae is. The course of a life. Everybody hands one over as proof of their credentials. Mine is a record of not having any.

Latin happened to be one of my favorite classes in high school. One of the few where I paid attention.

In middle school I was an ace at spelling bees. Standardized testing - reading, writing, and mathematics were virtually all 99th percentile. Up until the car accident. That is when everything changed.

It will always hurt to think what might have been if not for the accident and the addiction that followed. It will always hurt that I can write this and one of my best friends from high school can no longer write about his journey. His ended. Because of the same pills that derailed my life. It will always hurt to understand the greed, deception, and willful ignorance that created the environment for one of the most catastrophic health crises in American history.

Nothing hurts more than the loss of a human life. But you can ask anyone who has survived opiate addiction - living with the stigma that follows hurts as well.

Pain is a great teacher in life.

It does one of two things.

It paralyzes you with fear. Or it turns into purpose.

In my life, I have had it both ways.

So, yeah. 18. Dropped out. GED. Got clean. Was awful.

You know how to read and write damn well. Solving problems comes naturally. You are broke and, in many ways, broken.

There is a gap between what happens to you and what you do next. It is not always wide. It is always there.

In mine, a choice got made.

Gimli style.

Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for.

I slipped into the Ritz-Carlton as a server assistant. This ended up being a good place for me to kick back off. I learned a lot here.

This is where my language got its professionalism. Sincere. Eye contact. Five diamond standards. If a guest wants a pink elephant, you get them a pink elephant. Leadership. To this day, some of the best leaders I have ever known came from the Ritz-Carlton. It was leadership by example. General Managers who walked the back of the house and picked up trash as they went. Warm greeting. Good afternoon. Every single time.

While working at the Ritz, I saw a crack in the system. Become a wine sommelier.

The sommelier at the time at the Ritz really encouraged me to go for it. So I did.

My honest reasoning at the time?

The hours looked awesome. In that era, being 19 and being able to sling words like tannin structure and viscosity was sexy as hell. And I didn’t need a degree - I just needed to pass an exam.

I took the introductory certificate course when I was 19. Got the pin.

I took the certified exam a few short years later. And that exam - specifically the service portion of it - is something that always stuck with me.

It was being administered to me by George Miliotes, Master Sommelier. George would go on to become an icon in the industry in the years that followed.

George threw me a curve ball. One portion of the service exam requires you demonstrate your knowledge of cocktails and their preparation.

George’s curveball was asking me for a Harvey Wallbanger.

On the inside, I was saying to myself: George, man, you clearly see I’m a millennial and you are going to do this to me right now?

On the outside - and this is the important part, so pay attention - I said, “Sir, I am actually not sure on that one. Let me go ask the Maître d’.”

In life, you are not always going to have the answer. If the situation requires it, you go get it. No hesitation.

On the grading, I failed that section of the exam.

But George ended up talking to me about it afterwards. He said how impressed he was that I did not freeze - that while I didn’t have the answer, I had a response.

That conversation is the part that stuck with me. In a way, and I didn’t realize this until later in life, George helped me understand a part of myself.

The ability to pivot on the fly.

In service, of any kind, it is not your job to always have the answer. In service, if you don’t have it, just be able to go get it.

Once I was certified, I landed a position at a well-known steakhouse with a huge wine list. Being a sommelier was fun. It did not pay well. Not enough for my ambitions. Just for posterity, some highlights and lowlights about life as a wine sommelier.

Hours were cool. Job was a breeze.

Wine is cool. But not really the industry of wine, as it would start coming to be.

I like complexity. Wine is meant to be simple and complex at the same time. I watched as conglomerates would buy up labels - and the quality would plummet while the price stayed the same, and it became less about the merlot and more about the margin.

I always felt that was a shame.

I did not have the language for it then.

That was the first time in my life I ever read an incentive structure and understood, in advance, what it was going to do to something I loved. RIP Kim Crawford.

For me, it was the story inside the bottle that mattered. The single vineyard. Low yield. Only the strongest survive. Fortified.

On the record - my favorite wine is ZD Abacus. A solera-style blend of cabernet, across vintages. It is engineered precision in a bottle. ZD stands for Zero Defects. The winemakers were aerospace engineers.

Honorary mention to everything Italian. Italians simply do it better. I said it and I will stand by it.

I was kind of disenchanted by the business, and thinking back, it was just the environment. But, also…

I had friends who were pulling double time working timeshare sales in the morning and serving in the evening. And they told me how much money they were making.

That pretty much settled that I was going to pivot to selling timeshare. Wasn’t even really a question when they told me how many hours they had to work to make what they did.

The good news in Orlando was that, at the time, the only requirement to get a job selling timeshare was that you had to have a pulse and a basic understanding of how to use words out loud.

I had both. So much like Kevin Flynn - I got in.

Now.

My life to this point had been selling a product that had a very favorable effect for me. Alcohol makes people care less about the decisions they have made. That fact alone made my life very easy and pretty carefree.

Timeshare is a 90-minute presentation where, at the end, the customer is going to be committing to a 10-year loan at a truly astonishing interest rate, with an annual maintenance fee to go with it. There is a reason it paid well.

I will say this before I go on to the part that matters. I had streaks. I did well. The product weighed on me after a while. I grew up and I grew out of favor with continuing in the industry.

But that industry - and more specifically the training that came with it - is what set the foundation for my entire career.

For all of my fellow sales and marketing warlocks out there: this is the part where you pay attention to MattGPT.

That is Part Two.

In it: the framework a mentor handed me that I have run in every role since - C²PS. Credibility, commonality, problem, solution. How abstract reasoning actually works when you have to do it out loud. Metacognition - thinking about the thinking. Finding the gap everybody else walks straight past. And the third door, which nobody checks.

I told you earlier that the Italians simply do it better.

This is what I meant.

After the Ritz, I had a brief stint at a restaurant called Positano’s. There was a regular there - an Italian, of course - who one night told me I had the sprezzatura about me.

I was twenty. It sounded cool as hell. I had no idea what he meant.

Sprezzatura is Castiglione, 1528. The Book of the Courtier. It means studied carelessness - the art of concealing art, so that whatever you do appears to arrive without strain and almost without thought. The effort is real. The whole point is that nobody sees it.

Wizard. Genius. MattGPT.

Nobody ever saw the work.

That was the point.

Other people kept handing me words for myself. George gave me one. The Italian gave me one. Colleagues eventually gave me one.

I had no idea what he meant then.

I do now.

— Matthew J. Adams

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